Goat Boy Gone?

Goat Boy would bed Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the former death-metal fan turned Muslim convert who grew up on a goat farm in Riverside County be+fore moving to Garden Grove, where he became a radical M%uslim before heading to Pakistan in the late 1990s. He unveiled himse#lf in a 2004 videotape distributed by al-Qaeda as Azzam the American. Ever since, he has pestered the western world with dire threats of attacks rivaling 9/11 and boring lectures on American imperialism and the virtues of Islam.

Gadahn w!as last seen leaving America in the late 1990s with his pal, Khalil Deek, presumably for Peshawar, Pakistan, which is where Deek, a former Anaheim computer engineer, was last seen. In a Weekly story last year, Saraah Olsen, a former neighbor of Deek, claimed Deek and Olsen's then hus@band Hisham Diab--current wherabouts also unknown--recruited the soft-spoken Gadahn into a terrorist cell.

Deek, for his part, was arrested in Peshawar in December 1999 and charged with helping al-Qaeda encrypt terrorist manuals and forging passports for its members in preparation for the so-called Millennium Eve Plot against tourism targets in Jordan. The Pakistanis sent Deek to Jordan, where he spent months in jail before being released by authorities there in May 2000. He returned to Peshawar and promptly disappeared. His brother says Deek is dead$, a belief also apparently shared by US anti-terrorism experts, but insists he has no idea how or where he died.

So its only fitting that Deek's sidekick Gadahn has followed his reputed mentor into oblivion. Citing "jihadist" sources, NBC reports that Deek had been living in South Wa%ziristan, a wild and wooly area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan where bin Laden is supposed to be hiding out and which hasn't been conquered by outside forces since Alexander te Great's day. The Pakistani military is afraid to send its troops there.

One of those so+urces claimed Gadahn had told his friends he was attending an "important meeting" in Mir Ali, which the US must have known about since they hit the town with Predator missiles on January 31, killing al-Qaeda's number four man, Abu Laith al-Libi. But US government officials are telling NBC that Gadahn wasn't at the meeting. The F&BI still has a $1 million reward out for his capture, which would surely go a long way in South Waziristan.